Lame Apple Coverage

by Editor
July 1, 2015 at 9:30 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1413/lame-apple-coverage

In this day and age, there's just no excuse for publishing a news article about an appellate court decision without including a hyperlink to the opinion. Yet the Times did exactly that in an article that runs under the headline "Ruling That Apple Led E-Book Pricing Conspiracy Is Upheld." The Times reports:

By a 2-to-1 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said it agreed with the conclusions of Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court in Manhattan, who rendered the decision in 2013.

In yet another show of lameness, the Times article doesn't name the appellate court judges, or give any explanation of the reasoning of the dissenter. For the record, the two judges who affirmed Judge Cote were Debra Ann Livingston and Raymond Lohier, and the one judge who saw it the way I would have seen it was Dennis Jacobs, who wrote, "Apple's conduct, assessed under the rule of reason on the horizontal plane of retail competition, was unambiguously and overwhelmingly procompetitive. Apple was a major potential competitor in a market dominated by a 90 percent monopoly....Amazon's 90 percent market share constituted a monopoly under antitrust law." The dissent also includes a sharp criticism of the court-appointed monitor, Michael Bromwich:

It would take strong stuff for a lawyer to transcend the worldly incentives of this injunction: unlimited work at the (now cut) rate of $1,000 an hour, paid by a solvent party that may expect retaliation for protesting, in order to perform a monitorship subject to extension by the court for reasons that will be influenced by input from the monitor himself. An injunction that thus blurs the lines of the adversary system does no good for the reputation of the courts.

Again, none of this newsworthy stuff is in the Times article.

Update: Just for comparison's sake, check out how the Wall Street Journal covered it. That paper did a better job, naming all three judges, linking to the opinion, and quoting from Judge Jacobs' dissent and explaining his reasoning.

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